[gedy]

> We want children to enjoy life online. But for too long, their experiences have been blighted by seriously harmful content which they can’t avoid or control. Many parents share feelings of frustration and worry about how to keep their children safe. That must change.

Yes, stop letting kids stare at screens all day. Yes, you are a bad/lazy parent letting the firehose of the Internet pipe into their heads.

[mrmetanoia]

Yes, and stop using screens as a pacifier. People don't like to be told how to parent, but I'd settle for them just parenting. Shoving shit in your kids hand to shut them up isn't parenting.

I used to blame the shitty influencers and internet at large for the selfish greedy brats, but it's their parents. I've met too many exceptions where the difference was just "We limit their screen time." Maybe they end up shitty in some other way, I dunno, but at least they're going to be more functional than my nephews who my SIL is constantly trying to figure our how they get sucked into racism and greed and what to do about it. Stop letting them get all their views from greedy racists online would be a start - can't do that, she'd "never have a moments peace." Idiot human.

Side note, if you let your kids play roblox unsupervised, you're fucking up hard.

[narenst]

Children at school use a screen for school work starting in middle school (and sometimes even in elementary school). It is very difficult for parents or teachers to always supervise this. I think the adults should educate the children of safe online behavior but like other real world experiences they need have the independence when being online too.

[JohnMakin]

I agree with you but the inevitable counter argument is that not letting kids have unfettered access to screens and the internet is impractical to the point of comedy. I personally do not buy this argument, and although I do not have a child, my sister has kept my nephew screen-free so far and he's well at the age where kids start to use them independently. What does he do instead? He reads, he plays games (he's allowed some supervised access to video games), he plays sports. Stuff kids used to do and were totally fine.

The other argument is that this makes kids socially isolated from their peers, because they all have and use these devices. If that truly is the case there definitely still is a way to monitor your kids device and internet consumption without giving them free-reign. There are internet safety settings for parents on every device out there. Kids are perfectly capable of communicating with each other through a variety of mediums, they don't need tiktok (or whatever app is the trendy one of the decade).

The last argument, when you present the former argument, is that kids are clever and will find a way to get around controls. Yea, no shit, that's what kids do. Your role as a parent is to monitor that and teach/correct them.

[gedy]

Yeah I'm not talking about no access ever, I'm talking about the (very sad imho) situation where you see toddlers mindlessly staring at their tablet watching random videos/tiktoks while ignored by parents for hours, even if the mom or dad is nearby and and could be interacting with them.